A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

In which the random, trashy, pop-cultural musings of Mel are displayed in all their superficial glory.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

My aborted career as a prison governor. For some time now I've been looking for a wastepaper basket for my bedroom, and I was quite pleased to pick up this IKEA number at the local op-shop for $3. (It costs $10 at IKEA so that's a mighty saving.)

All the way home I was gloating about my purchase, planning to pop it over an unsuspecting Graham and thus turn it into a CAT PRISON, and chanting, "CAT PRISON, CAT PRISON" to myself under my breath.

But sadly I was foiled by Graham's Steve McQueen-like talent for prison escape. Well, basically, his 'talent' consisted of not curling his tail sufficiently close to his body to fit into the prison, and when I tried to stuff it back in, he backed away.

Even when I placed the prison temptingly on its side, he wouldn't so much as stick his head in. So I had to just use it as a bin. Gosh!

Let's add this to CAT CIRCUS in the list of ways in which Graham has failed to live up to my expectations.

Friday, February 10, 2012

That old abandoned warehouse. What are blogs for but for relating your boring dreams that your friends don't give a shit about. Anyhoo! Last night I had a disturbing dream. In the dream, my family were holidaying at a beachside location somewhere near Sydney (perhaps one of those northern beaches suburbs) and I was meant to be joining them, but I had recently moved house and still hadn't cleaned out all my stuff.

The beach where everyone was hanging out was quite an urban beach, which had a very high concrete promenade that also acted as a windbreak for those on the beach. At one end of the promenade was a kiosk; at the other it sort of petered out into a residential area. The beach felt familiar to me, as if I'd dreamed of it before.

It wasn't at all like most of the Victorian beaches I know, where to reach the sand you have to either beetle along a narrow dirt path through thickets of ti-tree, or descend down long wooden stairways built into massive sand dunes. It was more like I imagine an English seaside resort to be, although I've never been to one.

Anyway, so I went back to my old house, which mysteriously was accessible from this beach. It wasn't any of my real-life houses; set back from the street, it was a dilapidated Californian bungalow with a terrace to the side and back with outdoor furniture and unwelcoming pebbles and spiky native shrubs selected to be easy for tenants to maintain.

While I was trying to tidy away my remaining possessions into boxes, I was seized by a feeling of nostalgia and lost safety, as if I'd been happy in this house and was now cast into an unfriendly future. I felt that even though I was supposed to have moved out, if I could just stay here in the house everything would be okay.

I must have fallen asleep, because the new tenant was standing over me, trying to move in and very surprised to see me still there. He was a nerdy guy about my own age who looked as if he worked in IT. We fell to chatting and I started welcoming him to the house, showing him around and explaining how we had had our furniture set up and how we liked to use our free time in the house.

I realised I quite liked the new tenant and would like to be friends with him, but I realised I had to go back to the beach. I was on the train back there (mysteriously, I now needed to use public transport) and I had the sudden horrible realisation WHERE IS STAM? I had left my bag on the beach with all my stuff in it!

A sick feeling began to seize me and it suddenly became very important to get back to the beach. Some random person on the train said, "Oh yes, I think a bag like that was handed in at the kiosk…" but in my haste I got off the train at the wrong station, and then there were no more trains for ages.

At this point I woke up, but then I dozed off again and retconned the dream so that I had my phone on me, so I was able to make phone calls to find out what happened to Stam. But as it ended a second time, I was still stuck on the station platform.

In other news, you may have realised that one of my key personality traits is making throwaway lines come true, which is why I wasted half an hour yesterday designing this teaser poster for Whores of War, the exploitation film we jokingly brainstormed after seeing The Whistleblower, and which contained Anthony Morris's immortal line of dialogue, "I heard there were some whores in that old abandoned warehouse."

Today Anthony said the poster only makes sense if you know the line of dialogue, but I had an entire teaser campaign worked out where people would visit the website www.thatoldabandonedwarehouse.com and gradually learn more about the film.

Weekend vanity notes: Hulk Primer and Instant Pouffe. I am sick of my horrible pink skin. I wish I had beautiful pale porcelain skin but I am cursed with the kind of ruddy complexion that I imagine ought to belong to a tweedy English minor aristocrat named Bunny. I never wear blusher because my face is already so pink.

I was going to a wedding on Saturday and I was like, "How can I get rid of my stupid pink skin?" I was looking on a website called – embarrassingly enough – How To Be A Redhead, which advocated a stunning transformation from near-death alcoholic to Christina Hendricks using green-tinted makeup.

Having read women's magazines as a teenager, I am au fait with the theory of colour-wheel concealer – that is, using concealers in complementary colours to the thing you want to conceal. You use yellow to cover up purple circles under your eyes, and green to get rid of redness.

Years ago I dressed up for Halloween as the Incredible Hulk (that is where the Incredible Melk began) and I still have a tube of green face-paint. So I figured I would mix a tiny amount of this with my tinted moisturiser and see if I looked any less pink than usual.

In my hand the colour was mint-green but when I first dabbed it on my face it looked offputtingly greyish. I was like, "Oh my god, I am going to look like a corpse/Shrek/Elphaba/She-Hulk!" But once I smoothed it out it looked all right, and then I used my mineral foundation on top and it looked… better than usual.

This is what I looked like when I got home after roughly six hours of drinking wine and folk-dancing. (I have never before attended a wedding that involved everyone skipping around in circles and do-si-doing to the 'Colonel Bogey March'. That's right, the song about Hitler's goolies.)

I took this photo in my bathroom to get better lighting than elsewhere in the house. I am pretty happy with the results of my Hulk Primer. When I took my makeup off my face was very pink underneath, so I count it as a success. Also, in this pic I have mostly eaten and drunk my lipstick off, but it is my Journalism Power Lipstick (which I bought myself as a treat in the post-Christmas sales) – Revlon Blasé Apricot, as worn by Ita Buttrose.

Also, I had already taken my hair down; I had done Award Ceremony Hair, decorated with a black fabric flower with a diamante brooch pinned in the centre. So now to my second vanity note: the use of a bun hairclip to create a voluminous chignon.

The clip I used looks almost exactly like this. I stole it from my mother a few weeks ago when I was at my parents' house and wanted to put up my hair because it was so hot. But she has her hair in a bob these days so she said I could keep it.

Today I put my hair up in a high ponytail, flipped it forward, fastened the clip just above the hair elastic, then flipped the ponytail back over the top and pinned the ends in. Whala! Instant Pouffe.